Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature by Annabel Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature by Annabel Kim E. Nicole Meyer Kim, Annabel. Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature. UP of Minnesota, 2022. ISBN 978-1-5179-1088-4. Pp. 289. Brilliantly argued and written, Kim's book proposes daringly different readings to canonical authors ranging from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Daniel Pennac. Her opening sentence, "French literature is full of shit," immediately engages the reader. What follows does not disappoint. Through its transgression of boundaries, its potential to invigorate narrative, and its ability to reframe the materiality of language, excrement exudes power in the literary context according to Kim. While focusing primarily on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, Cacaphonies displays deep erudition, compelling theoretical support, and convincing critiques of other critics' misreading and dematerializing of shit through the imposition of psychic or other misfitting structures upon it. In addition, she recognizes the import of literary predecessors such as François Rabelais. Arguing that defecation in Céline's Mort à crédit is intimately linked to the lack of time, Kim convincingly argues that the material experience of defecation communicates Céline's struggle against death. Much like his later anti-Semitic political writings that color how this author is read, shit sticks to whatever surface it encounters. Kim deftly addresses Céline's failings while providing a riveting analysis of his essential role in both challenging and reframing what French literature is and what language can do. Samuel Beckett's Malloy transforms the concrete excrement of this predecessor to the passing of air. While both feces and farts pass through the anus, Beckett shifts the paradoxical relation of shit to the food that it once was, sending us out of the body, according to Kim. Although Jean-Paul Sartre's Saint Genet caused a definitive break between him and Jean Genet, the former's L'enfance d'un chef (1939) and the latter's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943) "mobilize fecality" to express the importance of freedom as these two pivotal authors see it. Turning to Holocaust-related narratives Kim turns to Marguerite Duras and Romain Gary. Marguerite Duras's La douleur illustrates the impact of the inhumane violation of human dignity upon the body. A close reading of Duras's description of her husband's inhuman, bubbling, viscous, slimy defecation bespeaks of the unspeakable experiences of the concentration camps. The formless nature of this voluminous matter expelled from her husband exceeds Duras's understanding as well as our own. Kim's reading of this scene points to how life and death are blurred, and how the act of wiping assimilates the person doing the wiping to the one who is wiped. In Kim's words, "shit is truly the leveler of difference" (159). Moving into the twenty-first century, her brilliant reading of Garréta's Dans l'béton exposes the political impact of this work. Garréta's antihierarchal, anti-difference approach and exposure of the pervasive social and cultural structures that exclude others reveal the ways this innovative author works with and against language. In Journal d'un corps, Daniel Pennac's displacement [End Page 278] of chronology contributes to how he places literature between propreté and propriété. Annabel Kim calls for a "caca communism" that understands feces and literary language as a shared corporeal experience. A must-read, Cacaphonies provides a truly insightful, engaging, and joyful reading experience. [End Page 279] E. Nicole Meyer Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French